Andy Coulson – 'A serious management failure'

MPs said they had not seen any evidence that Andy Coulson "knew that phone hacking was taking place". The Conservative party's director of communications was News of the World editor when royal reporter Clive Goodman and investigator Glenn Mulcaire were jailed for illegally obtaining messages from mobile phones belonging to members of the royal household. The committee concluded: "That such hacking took place reveals a serious management failure for which as editor he bore ultimate responsibility, and we believe that he was correct to accept this and resign."

MPs said they had nevertheless been struck by the "collective amnesia" of witnesses from the News of the World and said it was "inconceivable" that no one else, apart from Goodman, knew about the extent of phone hacking at the paper. The committee said it had "repeatedly encountered an unwillingness to provide the detailed information that we sought, claims of ignorance or lack of recall and deliberate obfuscation". The notion that Goodman was a "rogue reporter" acting alone, which has always been News International's defence, was directly contradicted by the judge in the Goodman and Mulcaire trial, they said.

MPs also contrasted the payoffs made by News International, the paper's parent company, to Goodman and Mulcaire, which the company said were made after legal advice, with the paper's refusal to compensate Matt Driscoll, a sports reporter who was sacked when Coulson was editor. A tribunal awarded Driscoll nearly £800,000 in November 2009 for unfair dismissal after it found he was persistently bullied by Coulson, the committee pointed out, noting that "the newspaper strongly resisted that particular claim".

Senior figures at News International, including chief executive Rebekah Brooks, were "strongly condemned" by MPs, who said they "sought to conceal the truth about what had really occurred".

Information commissioner – 'Confusion and obfuscation'

MPs criticised the Information Commissioner's Office for not notifying public figures they had been targeted by journalists and private investigators seeking to illegally obtain information.

"In the absence of a proactive approach from the then information commissioner [Richard Thomas], the onus was on individuals to question whether they had been victims," the committee concluded. "We are disappointed that the then information commissioner did not feel he had the resources to identify and inform all those who were or could have been the victim of illegal blags, [or] make the case that he should be given such resources."

The report says that the committee chairman, John Whittingdale, visited the ICO to inspect invoices obtained during its investigation into "blagging" – the practice of impersonating someone to obtain information from official databases. A total of 17,000 invoices or purchase orders from journalists had been seized, but the commissioner said he could not provide the committee with redacted versions to publish as part of the inquiry because it would take a member of staff between one and two weeks to "perform the redaction needed". He also doubted "whether [it] would serve any useful purpose".

When MPs discovered the information was available on spreadsheets, he continued to insist it would take too long, before conceding it held information relating solely to News International, and providing that data would take comparatively little time.

Labour MP Tom Watson said he was "struck by the reluctance of the information commissioner to put in the public domain what he knew about phone hacking and blagging". Watson added: "What we know now is that Scotland Yard is sitting on a whole bank of information and data about very senior people who were or have been hacked, but the public don't know about it".

He said the commissioner should take a look at what information Scotland Yard was holding, and decide whether there should be changes in the law to stop this happening again. The committee accused the commissioner of "confusion and obfuscation" about how much information it holds on which public figures have been targeted by journalists and investigators trying to obtain information illegally.

The police – 'Wrong decision' not to investigate

MPs criticised the Metropolitan police decision not to investigate further ­allegations of phone hacking at the News of the World in 2006. "The decision was a wrong one," the committee said.

The Met had uncovered a contract between Greg Miskiw, a News of the World former assistant ­editor, and private detective Glenn Mulcaire. Police also had a copy of an email from a junior reporter "for Neville", thought to be chief reporter Neville Thurlbeck, which contained a transcript of messages from ­Gordon ­Taylor's phone, obtained by Mulcaire.

The CPS supported the police decision not to take action and neither Miskiw nor Thurlbeck were interviewed by police.

MPs said: "The email was a strong indication both of additional lawbreaking and of the possible involvement of others. These matters merited thorough police investigation". MPs criticised John Yates, assistant commissioner of the Met, after he claimed the existence of the email "for Neville" and the Miskiw contract, both revealed by the Guardian, contained "no new evidence".

The committee said: "The real question, however, is 'new' to whom? The Guardian's original revelations relied on unused and unpublicised evidence available to the police. And revelation of facts not already in the public domain is the very definition of news." MPs said Yates had admitted that further interviews could have been conducted.

Yates told the committee it was hard to get convictions for accessing others' voicemails under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. The committee recommended that the law be amended to cover all hacking of messages.

The PCC – 'A failure of self-regulation'

MPs lambasted the Press Complaints Commission, describing its inquiry into the phone-hacking allegations as "simplistic, surprising and a further failure of self-regulation". The PCC inquiry, published in November 2009, "effectively exonerated the News of the World", the select committee noted, but had not "fully, or forensically, ­considered all the evidence".

The Tory MP John Whittingdale, who chairs the select committee, said: "We would certainly feel the PCC did not carry out a proper investigation before publishing their conclusions."

The PCC previously investigated claims of malpractice on Fleet Street in 2007, after the News of the World's royal editor, Clive Goodman, and the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire were jailed that year. It had accepted News International's claim that the men had been acting alone, but MPs said "the Guardian's fresh revelations in July 2009 provided good reason for the PCC to be more assertive in its enquiries".

Whittingdale said: "We certainly feel the PCC did not carry out proper investigation before publishing."

The Labour MP Paul Farrelly said the PCC report "quoted selectively from police evidence to us". Committee members also criticised the PCC's claim, in its report, that the Guardian's revelations "did not quite live up to the dramatic billing they were initially given".

In fact, MPs said, the paper's ­stories presented new information. ­Farrelly said the PCC's chair, Baroness ­Buscombe, had behaved naively by suggesting that the lawyer for the Professional Footballers Association chief, Gordon Taylor, had misled the select committee when he claimed police told him Mulcaire had hacked into 6,000 people's voice messages. "After the PCC report … the behaviour of … Baroness Buscombe, was not encouraging. I think she behaved naively and rather childishly in waving around a letter from the police... which sadly, resulted in the resignation of [Guardian editor] Alan Rusbridger from the code committee."